Room Escape Artist

Way back in the early days of escape rooms, Lisa and I were primarily known as New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts reviewers. This was because the overwhelming majority of our play was in our home market of New York/ New Jersey and Lisa’s parents live outside of Boston. When we traveled, it was almost always for work or a friend’s wedding.

Back in the day, escape room owners would ask us, “How do I get you to come review my games?” and our answer was, “Have one of our friends get married in your city.”

We had near encyclopedic knowledge of the escape rooms our home market.

These days, we’ve more or less played out our home markets, so we find ourselves playing escape rooms far less frequently, instead traveling on reasonably tight budgets and playing in escape room destination cities.

Both modes of play have their joys and struggles, and I’m going to explore them.

Local Escape Room Play

When I say “local play” I am taking a slightly broad definition as, any region that you either live in or visit regularly, and play enough that you really know the market.

Most every avid escape room player is a local player somewhere.

Deep Knowledge

Avid local players tend to have extensive knowledge of their local market, having played just about everything that’s average or above… and they frequently have played a lot of the weakest stuff either out of curiosity, completionism tendencies, morbid curiosity, or as a joke.

A Sense of History

Local players develop a sense of history within their region. They see individual companies develop and progress with each subsequent game, watching that company’s style grow or refine over time.

The more curious and involved they are, the more gossip they absorb from within the community.

Newness Bias

They also tend to play games when they are new… and this can lead to skewed perspectives on those games.

Sometimes this means that local players are experiencing a game before it gets beat up or falls into disrepair.

Other times, local players experience a game before it has matured. This happened with the iconic game The Dome from Mama Bazooka back in the day. The local Dutch players visited while the creators were struggling to make everything work perfectly. Those of us who traveled to play months after it had opened saw a fully realized and complete experience. This led to some confused online discourse between the locals and the travelers.

Regional Flavor Part I

Most regions have a regional flavor to their escape rooms. The big chains and franchises don’t adhere to these, and there are always outliers. However, we see it in the rules, the gamemastering, the hint systems, the level of difficulty, the types of puzzles, and the way that story is expressed. What’s interesting is that most local players don’t know this.

It does present itself when extremely experienced local players from different regions get into arguments with each other in online spaces. For each player, the norms are slightly different, but they don’t have a great way of knowing this.

And for myself, one of the strange things about the New York City escape room scene is that it had a classic NYC melting pot vibe because early on we had companies from Russia, China, Hungary, Japan, and Israel. So we just walked down the street and played completely different styles. It was neat, and it was the thesis of our first Escape, Immerse, Explore Tour way back in 2017.

TERPECA Challenges

A common challenge for local players is that in most places (outside of a few hotspot cities), there are only a few rankable games in TERPECA, and even fewer nearby winners.

This leads to players wondering, “Are the games in [insert escape room hotspot] really that good?” And the answer is usually yes (as long as the local flavor is to your taste).

Local Pride

A common trend of local players is a deep pride in local favorites. You tend to find yourself recommending the same list of “must plays” to people and that list rarely changes.

Something that I love doing is getting to know the owners of my favorite games, and asking if they are open to me entering for free with my paying friends, when they buy tickets to the game (assuming I have the time to join them). This is a win-win scenario because the company gets my regular recommendation… and I get to hangout with my friends and watch them play my local favorites.

The Driving Radius

While some people jump straight to hopping on planes to hit escape room destination cities, most people in the US tend to slowly expand their driving radius for escape rooms. The path to becoming a traveling escape room player isn’t always a straight line, and it’s subject to a wide variety of outside factors, but it creeps up on most of us.

Travel Escape Room Play

Traveling to play escape rooms wasn’t something that we had considered until we were deeply involved in this community for a couple of years. For us it started with tacking on short layovers while traveling for work and life… and then slowly escape rooms became the thing that made us want to travel.

Astonishing Experiences

Our desire to travel for escape rooms is driven by the astounding quality of the games that we get to play when we travel. I assure you, if the games weren’t as compelling as they are, we wouldn’t do it.

We play far fewer games per year than we used to, but the average level of quality of what we play these days is sky high. Playing mostly while traveling is the only way for us to achieve this.

Regional Flavor Part II

I mentioned regional flavors earlier… but I want to impress upon you just how varied escape rooms can be when you travel.

Some of the more extreme examples will come from international travel. Tokyo, Beijing, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Paris, and Athens all offer vastly different styles of games both from each other and from games that you could find within the United States.

And even within the United States: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orlando, Charlotte, and Boston all have distinctive styles from one another. The differences may not be as extreme as the difference between Tokyo and Athens, but they are very real.

Regional flavors is a deep topic, and something that we’ll inevitably write about in more detail.

Treading Where Tourists Don’t

Traveling for escape rooms tends to send us to far more interesting places that are devoid of tourists. This means that we aren’t usually eating at restaurants built for tourists. As an example, New Yorkers don’t eat in Times Square. Honestly the only time that I have visited Times Square for anything other than a show was for a friend’s birthday party a couple years back.

Times Square is overpriced and under-qualitied… which is a common outcome in tourist-focused neighborhoods. Getting away from these places is far more fun, interesting, tasty, and affordable.

Planning & Cost

The inherent downside of travel is that it’s costly in terms of money, time commitment, and planning. It just takes more out of you than popping downtown to play a couple of games.

For our part, we do everything that we can to cut costs. We fly cheap, pack efficiently, use mass transit wherever possible, and stay with friends as often as we can… but there is no denying that travel costs money. We budget and save in other parts of our lives to make sure that we can do this responsibly.

Intensity

On top of the travel itself and seeing the sights, travel for escape rooms is inherently intense, because unless you’re blessed with an abundance of time and money… you gotta play lots of games in a short span of time.

There are different schools of thought, and we have lived most of them.

You can go hard and pack in as many games as possible each day. While it has been years since we’ve done this, it was common for us to play 8-10 games in a single day for multiple days in a row. We had to forgo good meals to make this happen, but it was doable.

These days we play half as many games, sometimes less, and prioritize having 3 good meals per day.

The choice is a value judgement. Packing more games in reduces the odds that you’ll miss something great, but it comes at the cost of comfort and opportunity to reflect. Slowing down provides more comfort, and lets us spend more time basking in the moment after a great game.

We used to play more at once, in part, because it was difficult to effectively research which games we were most interested in. There weren’t resources to tell us which games would be high quality. These days, we (and by we, I mostly mean Lisa) can and do put in a lot more research prior to planning a trip.

In my opinion, there’s no right or wrong option here. Just make sure that you’re leaving enough time in-between your games to arrive on time for each game. Stuff happens occasionally, but if you’re regularly showing up late or missing bookings, you’re being disrespectful to the companies.

A Privilege

I want to be very clear about that travel for escape rooms is a privilege, and it’s one that we don’t abuse.

A lot of people don’t realize that Lisa and I still work regular jobs on top of putting nearly all of our free time into Room Escape Artist and the escape room community.

Our dream is to grow our community to a place where escape rooms are a meaningful part of the broader culture. That’s what we’ve been working towards here since 2014, and it’s what drives us to continually build our knowledge, expand our capabilities, care for our team, and refine our work.

Whether you’re a local player diving deep into a specific region or traveling the world, you’re helping to support this powerful and rapidly expanding medium of escape rooms, and we appreciate you for that. Just as we appreciate everyone who supports us on Patreon, whether it’s $2 per month or more. Every single person who contributes to our work is doing a huge thing for us. We hope that all of the content – both free and exclusively for Patreon – is bringing joy and value to your life.

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Special shout out to those who joined this month: Pants, Angela Ward, Marti, George Inglis, Василий Кумаев, Tiger Oakes, Keith Dozois, Simon Rühl, Hayden Sawyer, and Lennard Manke

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